She'd spent a fair amount of time waiting in her life – waiting for assassins, waiting for labour pains. She had the patience of the survivor. She lay still, colder and colder, her heart running faster or slower as the sounds of her pursuers came to her on the frosty air. The stars were different here, but childhood memory said that it was the middle of the second watch.
She bit her lips to avoid nodding off. The whole idea of ambushing her pursuers seemed foolish now – they had seemed so close behind her, but now they seemed cautious. She thought of rising to her feet, collecting her horse and fleeing again – but then there was a noise, quite close.
That option was gone.
'One of them came this way!' a young voice shouted. 'I have found an arrow!'
'Hush!' an older voice said.
They were close. Without turning her head, she could see a shadow – and a rising cloud of steam from a beast's breath. The easterners were quiet.
'I'll blow my horn!' the younger one said, in a mock whisper.
'You'll do no such thing!' his companion hissed.
Melitta's heart was pounding, and her mind, wandering free in the last seconds before action, focused on the notion that she used to feel less fear. How does fear creep in? she asked herself. Then she took a deep breath and rolled to her left – feet planted, hips on line, the bow drifting up, the tension of the string and her arm and the draw, all one. She didn't actually see her target or even, consciously, loose the arrow, but she was reaching with icy fingers for a second arrow – draw through the fingers, nock-
Screams.
Loose – drop the bow, left hand back to put it exactly into the gorytos, even as her right took a javelin. She was running forward. One was down, gut-shot and screaming, and the other was lying pinned under his horse, where her arrow had gone through his leg and into the horse's guts and the beast was flailing in the snow. She didn't bother with a throw, but pushed her slim javelin into his unprotected neck. The snow under him went black as the blood spurted and she ran on, straight at them. There were two more, and her legs were already tired, the tension in her hips left from childbirth and still not worked away, so that she was afraid to stop for fear she wouldn't run well again. She swept down the hill and found a third man – his bow out. He shot, and she threw her javelin, and she was still running. She was above him on the steep ridge. Without time to plan, she jumped and hit him squarely, toppling him from his horse and getting a vicious stab in her face – flare of pain – her akinakes across his throat, and she rolled off him and grabbed at his horse's reins.
The beast didn't move – the gods were with her, and she got herself into the high-backed Sauromatae saddle and was going, up the trail towards her own horse. Her new mount shied at the smell of blood and she clenched her knees and thumped her toes against his barrel and he was past the dead man and the wounded boy, still whimpering, and over the crest – she didn't even dismount to get her horse, just dropped her remaining javelin into its scabbard, collected her horse's reins and was away down the hill. As soon as she was back among trees, she made herself slow, made her horses walk. No snow this far down in the woods – nothing to give her away.
Behind her, she could hear the fourth man calling for his friends – terrified.
She was across the next stream and starting to worry about the wound on her face, which kept bleeding, so that the blood ran down her neck, colder and colder as it soaked the neck of her cloak. Then she was climbing again. She turned just short of the snow line and rode north and east, as best she could estimate in the moonless dark.
She saw motion on the last ridge and shouts reached her, and later, a horn call, but she was still moving fast, wishing she had not taken a wound and wishing, too, that she'd taken the other two horses. Her new horse was a fine beast, with a deep chest and a wide rump, and she only changed horses to give him a rest. He had scars on his chest and a set of ritual scars on his hindquarters in the barbed shape of a gryphon. So she called him Gryphon, happy in the knowledge that he was a warhorse of some age and thus a proven mount.
She lay up for an hour in a circle of tall spruce trees high on a ridge, where the snow was deep enough to hide the flames of a small fire. She needed the fire to melt water and refill her canteen and her water skin.
Her whole face throbbed.
She had lost her guide and her mentor. She had no food except the snack in her wallet, a honey cake wrapped in leaves and a big slice of cheese, both of which she consumed immediately, her cheek burning with pain as she chewed. She melted water in her helmet and filled her water skin and her canteen.
Only then did it occur to her to search the big wallet on Gryphon.
It was decorated in the Sauromatae way, made from two caribou skins sewn back to back, fur in, with decorations in dyed hair all over the outside.
I killed someone important, she thought. She poured a little water from her helmet into her horn cup and had a sip. Even just warm enough to steam, it was marvellous. She looked at the embroidery, a full winter of work for someone sitting in a lodge or a yurt on the sea of grass, and shook her head at the ways of fortune – Tyche, as the Greeks said. This man had been a warrior – a good one, with a fine horse and good kit. Probably veteran of a hundred raids – smart enough to be well back of his scouts. But his one arrow had missed her, and she'd killed him – as much by luck as skill. If she'd come over the hill a few horse-lengths either way, and given him time…
She sighed, wanting only to sleep. She reached her hands inside the warm softness of the embroidered wallet – so like Greek saddlebags, but made on the plains – and found that the wallet held two sets of treasures. She actually laughed aloud at the joy of it. There was a heavy fur hat, which she immediately put on her head, and a magnificent pair of embroidered mittens, made of caribou, lined in some fur that was soft and instantly warm on her fingers, and she almost cried.
But she couldn't stop. With her water bottles full and some food in her belly and mittens on her hands, she rode to the top of her ridge and looked north and south. Coenus and Nihmu, if they lived, would try to go back for her.
If they lived. And if Melitta went back the way she had come, she was more likely to fall in with her pursuers. She still had no food – she was exhausted.
'They'll just have to get on without me,' Melitta said aloud, and turned her horse's head across the ridge, heading north and east, to the Tanais high ground of her girlhood. Three ridges further, and no sign of pursuit. She was afraid to sleep – afraid to stop at all – but her own horse was flagging. She got them into a creek bottom, with running water, overhanging trees and no snow over the grass. She hobbled and picketed her mounts. Then, cursing herself for a barbarian, she opened up the dead man's beautiful wallet with her knife, slitting ten nights' worth of sewing to open it out as a sleeping pad, put her cloak roll under her,and lay down.
She lay open-eyed for longer than she could believe. Her horses made more noise than she could have imagined – whickering back and forth, crunching near-frozen greenery, belching, farting, drinking.
She awoke to cold and dark. Her head and shoulders had come loose from her pile of blankets, and she was cold right through. She got up, wished she had some food and drank her canteen dry. Then she refilled it from the icy stream, working cautiously to avoid wetting any part of her, and collected her kit, making the sloppiest of knots to tie her bed roll. She could feel the pursuit. She'd killed a man of consequence. They would track her.
She got the bed roll on to the back of her horse with an effort of will, surprised and dismayed at the loss of strength from just two days without food or much rest. The wound on her face felt odd, and she was light-headed, and all her dreams had been full of colour.